I was only too glad to be interrupted by our two husbands. Lulu ran up-stairs,—I supposed, to bathe her eyes and compose herself. She, however, was down again in a minute, with some drapery which she wound about her after the fashion Lady Hamilton was said to do, and represented, like her, the Muses, and various statues. With the curtain and one light she managed to give a very statuesque effect. Mr. Lewis was evidently very proud of her grace and talent, and she had a pretty, wilful, bird-like way with him, that was fascinating, and did not seem, as I thought it must really be, mechanical. I felt, more than ever, how idle it must be to talk with her. The affectionate respect, the joyful uplooking of wifehood, was not to be taught by words, nor to be taught, in fact, any way. Mr. Lewis's manner to his wife, which I criticized carefully, was always tender and dignified. And, from my knowledge of him, I felt sure that his expression was that of genuine feeling. Evidently he did not understand her feelings at all. She longed for encouragement and improvement. He looked at her as a lovely child only.
Being a minister's wife, I felt called on to labor in my vocation, and from time to time watch the pliant moment, and endeavor to lead Lulu's mind to the foundation of all truth. But, surely, never fell seed on such stony ground. To be sure, the flowers sprang up. Dewy, rich, and running, they climbed over the rocks beneath; but they shed their perfume, and shrank dead in a day, leaving the stones bare. I was discouraged about sowing seed.
The Lewises had been but a few weeks in Boston, when Lulu brought Mr. Remington in one morning to make a call. He was dressed in black, and told me he had been a widower six months. His bright, genial face and healthful nature seemed not to have sustained any severe shock, however, and he spoke with great composure of his loss.
He was at Mr. Lewis's a great deal. It seemed as a matter of course. As an accomplished man, with great powers of entertaining, he must naturally be acceptable there; but we were too much occupied with family and parish matters to see much of him, and about that time went on a journey of some weeks.
THE CONQUEST OF CUBA.
One hundred years ago the people of America were as much moved by martial ardor as are the American people of to-day. The year 1762 was, indeed, a far more warlike time than was 1862. "Great war" is now confined to the territory of the United States, and exists neither in Asia, Africa, nor Europe. Garibaldi's laudable attempt to get it up in Italy failed dismally. There was a flash of spirit, and there were a few flashes of gunpowder, and all was over. "The rest is silence." There are numerous questions unsettled in the Old World, but the disputants are inclined to wait for settlement, it would seem, until our affairs shall have been brought into a healthful state. Europeans complain that our quarrel has wrought them injury, and very great injury, too. They are right as to the fact. England has suffered more from the consequences of the Southern Rebellion than have the Free States of the Union, and France quite as much, and Spain as severely as any one of our States. In Germany, in Switzerland, and in Belgium, thousands of families have had bitter reasons for joining in the cry that Americans do not know how to manage their politics. We have heard of riots in Moravia, not far from the scene of Lafayette's imprisonment and that of Napoleon's greatest victory, caused by the scarcity of cotton. Yankee cloths that used to go into remote and barbarous regions, through the medium of the caravan-commerce, will be known no more there for some time. Perhaps those African chiefs who had condescended to shirt themselves, thus taking a step toward civilization, will have to fall back upon their skins, because Mr. Jefferson Davis and some others of the Southern Americans chose to make war on their country, and so stop the supply of cotton. The "too-many-shirts" cry, which so revolted the benevolent heart of Mr. Carlyle twenty years since, has ceased to be heard. The supply is getting exhausted. The old shirts are vanishing, and the new ones, instead of being of good stout cloth, are of such stuff as dreams are made of. There might be a new version of "The Song of the Shirt" published, specially adapted to the state of the times, and which would come home to the bosoms and backs of many men. Mr. Davis's war may be considered as a personal one against all civilized men, for it affects every one's person. The great civil war between Charles I. and the English Parliament was in part caused by soap, which the monopolists made of so bad a quality that it destroyed the clothes which it should have cleaned. Of "the monopolers and polers of the people," as he called them, Sir John Culpeper said, "We find them in the dye-fat, the wash-bowl, and the powdering-tub." As a monarchy was made to fall through the monopoly of soap and other ordinary articles, so was it purposed that a republic should be crushed through the monopoly of the material from which the sheets and shirts of laborers are manufactured. There was not much chivalry in the basis of Southern power, but most grand revolutions are brought about by acting on the lives of the masses, who are more easily moved by appeals to their sense of immediate interest than by reference to the probable consequences of a certain kind of political action. Our party-men know this, and hence it is, that, while they have not much to say about the excellence of slavery, they ask the Irish to oppose the overthrow of that institution, on the ground, that, if it were to cease to exist, all the negroes of the South would come to the North, and work for a dime a day,—which nonsense there are some persons so ignorant as to believe.
To return to 1762: the people of the Colonies were as martially disposed as are the people of the States in these days. "In the heat of the Old French War," says Mr. Hawthorne, speaking of the inhabitants of New England, "they might be termed a martial people. Every man was a soldier, or the father or brother of a soldier; and the whole land literally echoed with the roll of the drum, either beating up for recruits among the towns and villages, or striking the march toward the frontier. Besides the provincial troops, there were twenty-three British regiments in the northern colonies. The country has never known a period of such excitement and warlike life, except during the Revolution,—perhaps scarcely then; for that was a lingering war, and this a stirring and eventful one." There has not been so much movement in the Secession War as characterized that in which our ancestors were engaged a century ago, and which was fought in America and in India, in Germany and in Portugal, in Italy and in Africa, in France and in Bohemia. As the great Lisbon earthquake had been felt on the shores of Ontario, so had the war which began the year of that earthquake's occurrence shaken the world that lay on the American lakes. Forty years ago, old men talked as much of the Old French War—the Seven Years' War of European historians—as of the War of the Revolution. It was a contest but for the happening of which there could have been no American Revolution, at least none of the character that now occupies so high a place in history. Or, had it happened, and had the event been different, our annals would have been made to read differently, and the Fourth of July could never have become an institution. It opened well for the French, and, had not fortune changed, the colonists, instead of looking to Paris for aid, only a dozen years after its conclusion, might have been ruled by proconsuls sent from that "centre of civilization," as it delights to call itself. And even if the terms of the treaty which put an end to that war had been a little differently arranged, England might have triumphed in the war that she carried on against our ancestors. Both the war itself, and the manner of concluding it, were necessary to the creation of that American empire which, according to Earl Russell, we are fighting to maintain,—as unquestionably we are, though not in the ignoble sense in which the noble Earl meant that his words should be taken and understood.
Of the many conquests which were made by the English in the Seven Years' War, no one was more remarkable than that which placed the Havana and its neighborhood in their hands, virtually giving them possession of the island of Cuba; and the manner in which they disposed of their magnificent prize, when George III. forced peace upon his unwilling subjects, was among the causes of their failure to conquer the Thirteen States in the War for Independence.
That England should have been favored with the opportunity to seize Cuba was not the least singular of the incidents of a contest that was waged wherever Christians could meet for the pious purpose of cutting one another's throats. The English owed it to the hatred for them that was felt by one man, who assailed them in their hour of triumph, in the hope of gratifying his love of revenge, but who reaped only new humiliations from his crusade. He had better luck in after days; but in 1762 he must have entertained some pretty strong doubts as to the wisdom of hating his neighbors, and of allowing that sentiment to get the better of his judgment. Charles III., King of the Spains, the best of all the Spanish Bourbons, had, when he was King of Naples, been most grossly insulted by a British naval commander, and he had had to swallow the affront. "Being a good Christian, and vindictive," though he swallowed the affront, he could not digest it. He cherished the hope of being able to repay the English with that usurious interest with which men of all grades love to discharge their debts of the kind. He little thought that he was to wait near forty years for the settlement of his account, and that a generation was to pass away before he should be able to feel as Loredano felt when he heard of the death of Francesco Foscari.